


48 hours to live

by Majsasaurus



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
Genre: Angst, Boruto Manga, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Gen, I love next gen Ino-Shika-Cho A LOT, Ino-Shika-Cho Formation (Naruto), One Shot, Poor Shikadai, Teamwork, chapter 44, retelling of canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Majsasaurus/pseuds/Majsasaurus
Summary: “Hm”, the man says and takes something out of the big pocket of his jacket. It is a black, thick metal ring – a collar.Shikadai eyes the collar the man has in his hands, then forces himself to look up in the man’s eyes, realising what the man’s aim is. Now he becomes scared for real.“No”, Shikadai says, barely above a whisper. “No, no, please, don’t.”He doesn’t know what that collar does, all he knows is that he doesn’t want that close to him. The man brings up the collar and –CLICK.The retelling in which Shikadai is aware he might die.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 55





	48 hours to live

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shikamarubase](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shikamarubase/gifts).



> Happy belated birthdays Shikamarubase (tumblr and ao3) and Shikanaradai (tumblr and twitter)!
> 
> This work is a retelling of Boruto manga, chapter 44, in which Shikadai never gets drugged and is, in fact, awake and aware the whole time.

”How about a short training of Battle Royal?” Inojin asked that same morning. They sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling down towards the water. Shikadai had tried to nap somewhat, thought he was constantly distracted by Chocho’s munching on her chips. It was a new taste and a new brand, the chips were not the normal size and shape, they were twisty like fries. Chocho was excited.

She reviewed the chips as she ate, Inojin listened half heartedly and Shikadai tried to ignore her.

“A Battle Royale?” Chocho stops her reviewing of chips. “In the clearing downstream?”

“Yeah”, Inojin says. “I mean, Moegi-sensei said we should practise more and mum hasn’t dinner ready for another few hours.” He looks over at Shikadai, who has now his eyes opened. “And you should do something too, Shikadai.”

“What’s wrong with what I’m doing”, Shikadai asks.

“I’m going to beat you, you know”, Inojin says and he is smiling.

“Beat me”, Shikadai repeats, smiling back at his teammate. “I’d like to see you try.”

“I want to see Inojin beat Shikadai too”, Chocho says, earning an annoyed glance by her friend.

“Is it seriously that hard to believe?” Inojin huffs. “Just one good strike of Mind Transfer, and I’d have him bowing in front of me and calling me Lord Inojin.”

“Oh god, stop with your imagination”, Shikadai says and rises from the sitting position on the bridge. He can’t almost hold his laugh inside. “Come on then, Lord Inojin, beat me and I’ll treat you a soda.”

It had been fun and games. It was a Battle Royale, a formation in training they had worked on for a while, to perfect their teamwork and their chances to win future fights.

This time Chocho seemed biased by Inojin, however, since she too attacked Shikadai constantly.

“I still hear no Lord Inojin here!” Shikadai laughs when he hears Inojin creep around in the bushes. “Stop hiding.”

He hears Chocho prepare an attack and goes into hiding and Inojin jumps forward to paint an Ink Bird, successfully avoiding Chocho’s attack.

There it was!

Shikadai sees his chance to bring Inojin down, thanks to the strong sunlight and the shadow the Ink Bird casts in the ground and his shadow reaches just in time, and stops the Ink Bird completely.

“Woah!” Inojin yelps as he crashes down onto the ground. For a second Shikadai worries that he got hurt, but the wicked smile on Inojin’s lips tells him he’s okay.

“You forgot this is a Battle Royale?” Shikadai asks Inojin and Inojin laughs back.

“How about you?” he asks back and clearly has seen something Shikadai hasn’t seen.

Chocho comes attacking from the back and Shikadai is forced to drop his shadow jutsu around Inojin.

“I was sure you’d keep going after Inojin”, he says to Chocho after he had jumped away from her attack. She seems extremely satisfied at having surprised Shikadai.

“And I thought you might think that”, she says, smiling at him. “So I decided to outwit you.”

This is why Battle Royal is their favourite formation to train in. Because it is always so unpredictable. Anyone can be the enemy. Shikadai senses that both Inojin and Chocho will turn against him, and he can’t currently perform more shadows that to bind one of them. He backs away, trying to figure out a way to beat them both. Wind maybe? Anything to avoid being outnumbered and later ridiculed by calling Inojin “Lord Inojin”.

Luckily, Inojin is one step ahead of him, suggesting to call it a day. He is already hungry.

Chocho is not satisfied at all.

Oh, when the world was still okay and you could be dissatisfied by such small, trivial matters.

Suddenly the sound of a slow clap reaches the trio, and they turned around to see a stranger leaning against a tree, smiling smugly at them. He claps, claps and continues to clap.

Shikadai realise this stranger had been watching them for the whole game. Why hadn’t they noticed him? Why hadn’t Inojin noticed him, when he should be able to? Slowly, Shikadai turns suspicious. This doesn’t feel right.

That is of course before the suspicion turned into fright.

The man _knows them._ He knows they are part of the Ino-Shika-Cho-trio, he knows who they are.

The man asks for a lighter and Shikadai almost scoffs at the man to piss off, but he is still so confused by why and how this man knows them, so he doesn’t say anything. He hadn’t seen the man before, and, considering how good face memory he has, he is certain this man is not from Konoha. He is from somewhere else, a stranger, a possible enemy.

An enemy, Shikadai concludes in the heat of the situation.

“Who the heck are you?” he asks, and doesn’t care how rude he sounds.

The man comes closer and Shikadai feels unsure. The man walks straight towards them, similar to how predators close in to their preys.

“Hey, hold it right there!” Shikadai says, angrily this time. When should he attack? Should he attack? “Konohagakure lies just beyond. State your business, mister!”

He knows he’s just thirteen and doesn’t look like a terrifying ninja, but he stands securely on two legs and tries to seem angry and threatening.

The man knows his name! He knows Shikadai’s full name. And wants to talk to dad.

Shikadai makes the decision to _end this bullshit now._ He brings his hands up, ready to paralyse the man, to stop him from coming closer to them, because now he begins to feel slightly afraid.

“Are you even listening to me!” she snarls. “I said halt! You are too sketchy!”

_Sketchy? Who even says that?_

He could’ve said: you are an enemy to me, but didn’t. He called him “sketchy”. What a splendid way to sound threatening.

The man allows himself to be swallowed by the shadow and Shikadai wants to smirk at how easy it was, but before the corners of his mouths move the man does something… unpredictable. A metal tuning fork exposes itself in his open palm and the second Shikadai registers what it is he has –

That noise.

Piercing, painful, sawing sound of Shikadai doesn’t even know what it is penetrates his eardrums and he can’t do anything.

Inojin and Chocho screams in the background – they are equally crippled by the sound. Shikadai wants do to something and when he looks down at his own weapon, he sees how the shadow thins out and snaps.

_No!_

Then something Shikadai didn’t even know was possible happens. His shadow, his weapon – his _own_ shadow, turns itself inwards and climbs up his legs.

Shikadai knows what it feels like to be paralysed by a shadow. It was the first step in training with dad when he was younger – to know what the attack you are subjecting to others feels like. It tickles at first, then it feels like you can’t move, but it never hurts.

This doesn’t tickle. This is fright itself climbing up his legs, locking him in, forcing him to stand still and not move a single centimetre.

“Shikadai!” Inojin screams, surely he and Chocho by now realised what was going on. They were still too crippled by the sound to move, to help him.

Shikadai doesn’t hear the sound anymore.

His brain has frozen.

The only thing he hears is his own thoughts screaming _oh shit oh shit run away run away SHIKADAI HE IS GOING TO GET YOU!_

But he can’t move.

The man walks up to him and he looks at Shikadai with mild disappointment. Like Shikadai’s try to stop him wasn’t what he expected. Like Shikadai himself is a disappointment. 

“Hm”, the man says and takes something out of the big pocket of his jacket. It is a black, thick metal ring – a collar.

Shikadai eyes the collar the man has in his hands, then forces himself to look up in the man’s eyes, realising what the man’s aim is. Now he becomes scared for real.

“No”, Shikadai says, barely above a whisper. “No, no, please, don’t.”

He doesn’t know what that collar does, all he knows is that he doesn’t want that close to him. The man brings up the collar and –

 **CLICK**.

Shikadai feels cold metal enclose around his neck. The metal is thick and heavy, not tight enough to strangle him, but not big enough to get it over his head. His breathing is secured, but in that moment he can’t breathe. He tries to bring up a hand to push the man away, to feel the black collar, to do something, but the shadow restrains him.

“Whether you survive past today or not depends on your father”, the man says calmly.

“Get it off me!” Shikadai screams and he still doesn’t know that the collar is for, but all he can feel is the symbol of ownership across his neck. Why would one put a collar around another human’s neck if not to wordlessly tell that _you are now owned by me_?

Having his integrity stripped of him and sheer panic going through his body, his chakra in his feet is drawn back and moves up to his head instead. The shadow around him fades into nothing and Shikadai pushes himself off the man and stumbles back.

He imagines he can’t breathe and grips around his neck with his hands. The metal has now become his own skin temperature and doesn’t feel as cold anymore, but the inside of Shikadai’s body is cold as ice.

_Why did he do this to me?_

The man scoffs, almost bored, and fiddles around with the cigarette he has in his mouth.

“It is a bomb”, he said. “The collar is a bomb. Play easy now, Shikadai.”

Shikadai’s fingers tense around the thick collar.

_No, no, no, no, please let this be just a stupid nightmare._

He imagines the collar being filled with metal shards that will slice his throat once ignited, he imagines his skin melt off, he imagines dying –

“Mom!” Inojin yells after he connected to Ino via the Mind Body technique. “It’s Shikadai! He’s – he’s in big trouble!”

 _Big trouble?_ What an understatement.

“Can you put me in touch with master Shikamaru, like, right now?” Inojin continues while eyeing Shikadai, who is sitting on his knees, clutching the metal collar around his neck with sweaty, shaking hands like his life depends on it.

A lot of things happen next.

Ink Lions, Earth Style jutsus.

Moegi-sensei and Sai arrive together with other ANBU-shinobi.

The enemy remains unaffected by the army. He looks at Sai with interest.

“Yamanaka Sai”, he says and then looks at Inojin. “Hm. Your son is untouched.”

“Don’t speak about my son”, Sai growls and Moegi-sensei moves to action, trapping the man in an Earth Style prison.

Shikadai feels some kind of relief. Now they can maybe make the man undo this – this _mistake_ and take the collar off him, and he can continue his life like nothing bad ever happened?

“Listen closely, Kazamatsuri Moegi”, the man says. Shikadai can’t believe it – he knows them all! Who _is_ he? “You see the object hanging from that tree branch behind me?”

They all look at the great chestnut tree behind the man. Around one of its branches a similar metal collar hangs. Shikadai feels anxiety storming around in his stomach, in his head, in his whole being. This doesn’t feel right.

“It’s identical to the one I put on Shikadai”, the man continues. It feels like time has stopped. “I’m going to trigger it to detonate now. Yes, without being able to move at all.”

Time truly has stopped.

“Boom”, the man says and he is _smiling._

The lights, the sound and the smell of the explosion behind the man, who remains calm in the earth prison, get right up to Shikadai.

He is falling.

He falls down and wraps his hands around his head because the mortal fear, death agony, is real now. He feels someone touch his shoulder, but he doesn’t know if it’s Inojin or Chocho or Moegi or Sai or someone else.

Shikadai doesn’t want to hear what the man tells them next.

The collar around his neck is set to auto-detonate in 48 hours.

_48 hours._

That is two days. Shikadai wants to throw up.

The man continues talking, telling them what his demands are and Shikadai sees how Moegi-sensei releases the man from the earth prison, but Shikadai can’t really take in what anyone is saying. The man claims he wants to defect to Konoha and Shikadai wants to yell at him to fuck off and at the same time yell to his father to let this man defect to Konoha, anything to get this collar off him.

He feels the collar around his neck – the bomb.

And there is only one thing that penetrates his mind.

_I don’t want to die!_

**Author's Note:**

> I am forever banned from the Shikadai Protection Squad, now, aren't I?
> 
> tumblr: unioncolours.tumblr.com  
> twitter: majsasaurus


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